Intellectuals

Rating:
Summary: Not really about "intellectuals"
Review: This is a gossipy, entertaining, informative book about how the personal lives of what Johnson defines as "intellectuals" affects their beliefs. However, many of those he writes about aren't intellectuals. Hemingway, Lillian Hellman and quite a few others aren't intellectuals. Others, such as Marx and Rousseau, were. Johnson is by his own admission attacking leftists, which is entirely appropriate since they have been responsible for more death and destruction in the world than anyone else. But if he was going to attack them, he should have included others, such as the Marquis de Sade, of the founders of modern leftism. (And his life would have certainly been tillitating.) But when Johnson is on the mark, he's right on it. The chapter on Marx and his pathological lies and complete lack of scholarship is worth the price of the book. Ditto for Rousseau. Buth the others?...Shelley and Fassbinder, for example...well, his expose' of them is interesting, but I doubt they belonged in this book. Johnson would have done better to write two books--one about leftist intellectuals and one on artists. Still, for all its flaws, it's a fascinating read.

Rating:
Summary: Pulls punches on Chomsky.
Review: I think Christopher Hitchens was half-justified in his attackagainst Johnson for trying to link the work and ideologies of the said 'Intellectuals' with their private misdeeds. But Johnson does the occasional decent job of exposing the hypocrisy of these producers of moral swarf. For instance, he points out that Sartre never so much as lifted a finger or even spoke out against the anti-Semitic atrocities that were occuring in Germany under Hitler's facist regime. Yet Jean-Paul Sartre later in life was one to frequently mention and write about the crass vulgarities of anti-Semitism.

And then there are other times when Johnson's method of trying to prove that his subject's moral high ground is below sea level doesn't work. His chapter on a mendacious Ernest Hemingway does nothing to erase the fact the he was probably the best American writer next to F. Scott Fitgerald to encapsulate post-WW1 sentiment, with a brilliant ideosyncratic prose style. Because Hemingway wasn't ... like Sartre, Johnson's chapter on Hemingway won't alter his place in literary history.

Johnson saves his weakest attack at the very end of the book for MIT linguist Noam Chomsky. Because Chomsky is 'an old-style utopian, rather than a new-style hedonist intellectual', Johnson refrains from making ad hominem personal attacks on him. Instead, Johnson offers a brief biography followed by a tepid elenchus of Chomsky's position on Vietnam. Johnson claims that Chomsky was opposed to the war in Vietnam by virtue of his linguistic theories on syntax. That isn't true at all. Apparently, Johnson hadn't read the book Chomsky wrote in '69 outlining his opposition to Vietnam: 'The New Mandarins'. Johnson, however, correctly decribes the bizarre wayward opinions Chomsky took in the late 70's on the massacres the Khymer Rouge committed in Cambodia, before eventually concluding that 'the American Devil made them do it'.

A facinating look into the lives of the thinkers that have shaped our thought in the last 200 year, even though some of the arguments are meaningless.

Rating:
Summary: Johnson Nails The Deleterity Of Leftist Intellectuals
Review: Paul Johnson does history and truth a service with his follow-up to his magnificent 1983 edition of Modern Times. Struck during Modern Times' writing at the influence of certain intellectuals in history, Johnson examines some of the most influential over the final two-plus centuries of the second millenium of time.

Critics have noted that he concentrates on intellectuals of the left. The reason he makes manifest over the course of the book and his other works - it is the influence of the left that has been cause of most of the damage done to the world over the centuries.

This is demonstrated most tellingly in his examination of Karl Marx. Here was an intellectual who had more influence on real events than any other. And it is here that the failings of the leftist intellectual become grotesquely clear - the megalomania, the obscene self-regard, the contempt for basic truth. One example best displays Karl Marx's failings as a scholar - his falsification of a speech by British Finance Minster W.E. Gladstone, a falsification intended to condemn capitalism when the actual speech made clear that capitalism was in fact working. Marx's falsification was pointed out at the time, which led to "a massive discharge of obfuscating ink" designed to lie his way out of it.

Johnson also displays the real reason Marx hated capitalism - because of "his gross incompetence at handling money." Such personal failings drive intellectuals as few others have bothered to realize. Johnson demonstrates this again and again with Jean-Jacques Rousseau - who advocated totalitarianism not because it was a worthwhile form of governance but because it offered a conventient excuse for his dumping his illegitimate children in state-run orphanages - and others such as playright Bertoldt Brecht.

Johnson examines Ernest Hemingway and Victor Gollanz, author and editor respectively who participated in numerous campaigns of disinformation in the name of an even larger act of disinformation - the hiding of the horrors of Stalinism. Hemingway's contribution was his false portrayals of events in the Spanish Civil War, and Johnson shows how this led Hemingway to break with long time friends who'd seen what was happening in person and saw Hemingway was getting it wrong. Johnson also delves into "The Crook Factory," Hemingway's WWII con that let him horde scarce fuel supplies in Cuba on the pretext of hunting fascist spies that he never once found.

Johnson's chapter on Lillian Hellman is worth reading in that it deals with a playwright who achieved enormous power through skillful lying and who won an enormous following even after reality destroyed her fantasy world - it is doubly worth reading in light of the widespread deification of another manipulative megalomaniac who has lied her way to great power through eight years as First Lady. In the case of Hellman, Johnson finds a doubly fascinating chapter - the rise and unexpected fall of the author of the great "Julia" hoax. Johnson not only details Hellman's activity with Communism, her deceitful coverup of such activity, and her mendacious autobiographies, but he also details her relationship with mystery author Dashiel Hammett, how he changed her writing, and how she impoverished his daughters.

By far the best part of the chapter is the unexpected collapse of the Hellman mythos. It began with Hellman's vindictive lawsuit against Mary McCarthy after her famous line, "Every word (Hellman) has written is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" It accelerated with Samuel McCracken's expose of how Hellman fabricated a "true" story of an Austrian anti-Nazi named Julia (which became a famous Jane Fonda film in 1977), and exploded when Austrian records demonstrated that "either Julia was Mary (Murial Gardener) or she was an invention, and in either case Hellman was exposed as a liar on a colossal scale." And yet Hellman's funeral was well attended by Hollywood types who ought to know better, and even today Hellman is still treated respectfully.

Johnson also adds comparatively quick pieces on intellectuals such as filmmaker Ranier Werner Fassbinder, author James Baldwin, and MIT professor Noam Chomsky - the Chomsky chapter is especially ugly because it details an intellectual who has used his great mind to lie for the worst genocides of the post-WWII era and whose reputation remains untarnished (Chomsky has been recently deified by the awful leftist rock group Rage Against The Machine) even today.

That we must beware leftist intellectuals should be manifest, as Johnson courageously demonstrates.

Rating:
Summary: Does not prove his Thesis
Review: Paul Johnson sums up his book by saying that "People are more important than ideas". In other words the ideas of these men have corrupted society. His proof of that is the lives these intellectuals lived, not the the ideas themselves. A better way to attack these thinkers from the left(they are the only kind that Johnson attacks in this book)would have been to show the direct results or fallacies of their ideas. For example, Patrick Glynn does a good job of disproving Bertrand Russell's ideas on sex and marriage in GOD: THE EVIDENCE. Having said that, this is a fun book to read to get an idea of what kind of lives these men lived. The chapter on Marx and his 'scientific' method was the high point for me.

Rating:
Summary: As a philosopher, Johnson makes a good historian.
Review: Paul Johnson is a lively writer who has chosen a an interesting group of people to portray. As a Christian who votes mostly Republican, I am no big fan of most of these figures, except for Tolstoy and (to a lesser degree) the author of Old Man and the Sea. I am ready to agree that Rousseau, Marx, and Sartre, and all,have by their words and lives helped make a mess of the world. (In fact, I have made the case about Marx myself more than once.) Furthermore, the book is entertaining. Despite all that, I don't much recommend it; perhaps because it is entertaining.

First of all, I am not sure Johnson had enough sympathy for his subjects to really understand them. A few of the lives Johnson describes here are also discussed by the psychologist Paul Vitz in his less-detailed but far better-argued study of atheists, Faith of the Fatherless. After reading Vitz, Bertrand Russell seems a sad and rather lonely figure, who lost both parents as a small child and spent his life looking for God in all the wrong places. Johnson portrayed him, more simply, as a devious and self-deluding hypocrit. Maybe so, but is the implicit invitation to contempt helpful or harmful? Johnson's approach contrasts with the more orthodox approach of G.K.Chesterton, who once responded to an essay contest on "What is wrong with the world?" with the succcint reply, "I am."

Unlike Vitz, Johnson does not discuss any positive figures in this book at any length. After a few hundred pages of criticism, I wanted to ask him, "Whom do you admire? Do you find anyone whom you disagee with genuinely heroic?"

Johnson claimed that Tolstoy's power as a writer sprang from "veneration of nature." How can he miss, what is obvious to everyone else (including conservatives), the moral insight and incredible awareness of human nature Tolstoy displays? Johnson even tried to blame Tolstoy for the Bolshevik revolution. Read Resurection and the Communist Manifesto, and tell me that is not a cheap shot.

Secondly, Johnson does not really give a coherent argument in this book, as many reviewers note below. What exactly is an intellectual? What relation does the term have with the word "intellect?" Can we really exclude prominent men and women of ideas like, say, C.S.Lewis, George Orwell, or G.K.Chesterton, whom, for want of plausibility or desire, Johnson failed to criticize? Perhaps what he really meant by the word was "humanists," those children of the enlightenment who replace God-centered faith with a religion of men, themselves in particular. Jesus said, "By their fruits you will know them," so I don't think it merely ad hominem to note when these prophets treat people like dirt. Ideas have consequences, and I do agree that humanist ideas have most had bad consequences. But the argument to make this case should be more focused and logically coherent than this one.

Johnson gives us two pieces of advice: beware of intellectuals, and people matter more than ideas. But he hasn't really told us what an intellectual is. Is it those to whom ideas matter more than people? But it's not at all clear that many of the worst offenders in this book really cared about ideas; in fact Johnson often questions it himself. And "people matter more than ideas" is itself an idea. For that matter, "Love your neighbor as yourself," and "all men are created equal" are ideas too, that many men and women have thought worth more than their own lives. It seems to me that what Johnson should have said is, "watch out for bad intellectuals" (or bad people in general) and "don't listen to bad ideas." Truisms, of course, but he hasn't really built a case for any more than that. And the lives he details do show that neglect of the obvious is one of the most harmful errors of our time.

Thirdly, as interesting as other people's sexual vices might be, it does seem a tad unfair of Johnson to complain about the dirt and wallow in it at the same time. In some places the book is almost pornographic. If an author does not approve of sexual obsessions, he should talk about them a bit less.

Johnson is good at research, and an excellent writer; I learned a great deal from Modern Times, and from this book as well. But as far as editorial on these sorry lives go, I think King David said about as much as really needs saying:

"Happy is the man who does not take the wicked for his guide, nor walk the road that sinners tread, nor take his seat among the scornful. But the law of the Lord is his delight."

author, Jesus and the Religions of Man [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: The Art and Artist Are Not One, but Two
Review: This is the first book I read by Paul Johson and found it incredibly interesting, most noteably because I enjoy reading about the lives of "great" people...often times, as this book highlights, the lives, friends, and especially family of intellectuals and other "greats" are negatively impacted by the very nature of what makes that person great in the minds of countless, anonymous others...you may like to read Hemingway or Marx, but after reading this book, you realize that to achieve greatness on a historic scale, one often is forced to both carry and administer lot of turmoil and pain in their personal lives. Something for any aspiring artist or writer, and highly recomended to those who are interested in some of these modern heroes.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Read, But Flawed Argument (Maybe)
Review: Paul Johnson's Intellectuals is a must read for anyone who loves history, philosophy, biography, or just plain juicy gossip. It's style is wonderful - fast paced with clear prose that makes you feel like you are being told a good, gripping story. There are enough details, backed by extensive notes, to keep you well informed, but not so much that the non-history buff will find his eyes glazing over. There is also some solid factual ammunition for conservatives in Johnson's account of Marx's utter lack of scholarship.

Perhaps the one serious drawback about the book is that Johnson does not really draw out the argument which it was written to make. Johnson wants to call into question the authority of intellectuals who lead immoral lives to give the average man advice about life, but other than raising the question, he does little to draw the argument to a logical conclusion. Reciting the numerous vices of the intellectuals in question is not an argument. It must be connected with some other proposition, such as that those who are immoral are intellectualy unreliable, or that bad ideas come from bad people, in order to make a case. In the end, Johnson fails to do that, and the book ends up more like a circumstantial ad hominem (at its best) or an extended gossip column (at its worst).

I would recommend the book as a delightful, informative read, but if you are looking for logical argumentation, you will have to supply your own. Intellectuals supplies the conservative with a great deal of material from which to create a premise, but the logical form and the conclusion will have to come from some other source.

Rating:
Summary: Fun for a few seconds
Review: Being an independent thinker who comes down on the left side more than on the right, it will be no surprise that I'm not a fan of Paul Johnson. However, INTELLECTUALS is useful in that it reminds us that we--especially our most honored literary and cultural figures like Percy Shelley and Norman Mailer--are all extremely fallible. Of course, that being the case, what is so unusual about the people he produces as case studies? They lie? They cheat? There are very few people who do not engage in such activities at one time or another. The fact that these people were famous and engaged in left-wing activities seems to be their most outstanding vice, according to Johnson. Apparently this makes them more egregious than individuals like Augusto Pinochet, or Newt Gingrich, who served his wife with divorce papers as she was dying of cancer. Another problem I have with the book is that there is very little new information to be gleaned. It will surely come as no surprise to anybody who has ever had the dubious pleasure of reading a Hemingway novel that he was a compulsive liar. Johnson's message seems to be that we should just keep to ourselves and not try to make the world a better place. In my book, THAT's a vice.

Rating:
Summary: A muckraker to the last.
Review: Judging from the other reviews of this book, *Intellectuals* brings out the best in all of us. Almost everyone seems to have a strong reaction; whether it be a knee-jerk bit of accolade from the conservative, or the outraged tantrum of the liberal gent, this book seems to provoke almost all readers in some way or another.

On to my "knee-jerk" reaction. I found the book to be an easy read, and the saucy details of these sketches will appeal to those not concerned with frivolous details . . . such as a decent premise for a book. Though Johnson is at pains to give each "intellectual" his or her due (Shelley the great poet, Ibsen the master playwright, etc.), this is nothing more than an old-fashioned slaughterhouse hatchet job.

The only premise I can see behind these lines seems to be a frail attempt at a 300+ page 'ad hominem' argument. That is, Johnson has become a muckraker--someone to point out the sad details of several lives, in hopes of what . . . changing our minds about these people, or is the intent to change our minds about their ideas? Everyone can agree that Rousseau's life was a pitiful one, and yes, he shouldn't have gone around pretending to be a moral saint. But this does nothing to damage the ideas he professed. Johnson sometimes hints that this is not his intent (to taint liberal politics by way of association), but if not, one has to wonder about the choice selections for the book. Shelley, Marx, Rousseau, Russell, Chomsky--the one-sided politics here is as obvious as can be.

Johnson is often a good author; even in this book, one can't reproach him for turgid prose. However, a writer of his caliber should not be reduced to such muckraking. Yes, conservatives will rejoice, and liberals will retch. I will only issue caution--ask why someone so establishd as Johnson should want to write a book like this, if there weren't political motives involved.

Rating:
Summary: An honest Conservative
Review: I had not encountered Johnson's work before reading this book (and I did not know just how famous he is), and I was fascinated by his insightful comments about the lives of historic figures of great importance. It is true that Johnson - a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative if I ever saw one - suspiciously leaves out dubious intellectual figures of the Right, but nobody should be required to give "balanced" accounts, and you cannot charge Johnson with sloppy scholarship.